Marcia Xavier is a photographer ready to transform images into other things, to create a world that just does not want to reflect the existing one inviting the viewer to be part of the work that needs to be revealed through the action: the objects are asking to be touched either for their movement in space or to grasp the variety of lighting effects.
Disillusionment optics is the fil rouge of this exhibition housed in the Galleria Candido Portinari Palazzo Pamphili from 30 October to 27 November. The title reveals the artist’s interest in the water surfaces, mirrored and glassy, used to create optical tricks in order to explore the transience of the images. The endless variations offered by these materials seems to dissolve the certainty of reason.
The artist has a kaleidoscopic look at the world, where everything is illusory, uncertain, changing, and invites the viewer to experience an extended time. Acceleration of the real world, regurgitating unreflective images. This artist presents the contemplative slowness, a sort of gentle, playful, subjective, non-transferable usage.
Just at the entrance, a peephole placed on the window offers the viewer a fiction of space-time: the eye is inside the Pantheon and sees an arm and a giant hand. And that’s a metaphor of its presence that tries to reach the central oculus as if going to touch the sky.
On the floor there are light boxes that suggest an imaginary game of reflexes, like pondsthat can reflect images of another space, in this case, the frescoes by Pietro da Cortona , just above the gallery, depicting Venus and Juno while trying to help and hinder the passage of Aeneas leaving Troy in flames.
For each of them there are cylinders or balls of acrylic, asking to be touched and moved on the surface light in order to multiply the effects, animating the figures and making them floating in space.
In the second room, the light separated into its seven colors seems to merge with the music and its seven notes, the tune of Ambrosian chant that invades and moves the environment . The multicolored image and mirror image of the hands of St. Agnes, obtained with the artifice of projection, urges the viewer to decipher its ambiguities.
Also in this case the photographic image carries inside the tunnel distinctive icons of another space: the elements of the visible space seem to lead to invisible, although present space.
Marcia Xavier was born in 1967 in Belo Horizonte. She lives and works in Sao Paulo in Brazil. In 1989 he graduated in Arts at Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation . Major international exhibitions: 2015 Prismal University of Milan, Italy. 2014 “On another scale” Galeria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy and Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, Wexner Center for the arts, Ohio, USA. 2012 Eloge du vertige, Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris.VI Biennial of Havana Bienal do Mercosul Cuba. III and IV Bienal Curitiba. In Brazil she has participated, among others, in the following exhibitions: São Paulo City Museum, Museum Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Banco do Brasil Cultural Center at Rio de Janeiro. In 2013 she received the ‘The Artistic Residency Prize ICCO in Rome, Italy. In 2012 the II Itamaraty Prize for Contemporary Art. Her works belong to collectionsof : Sociéte Générale d’art Contemporain, Paris, France; MAM and March Rio de Janeiro, MAM, Itaú Bank and SESC São Paulo.
Carlo MARINO
